Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Twitter is great for networking as it, contrary too all other social networks, allows you to connect and communicate with random strangers with exactly those interests you are after. That’s one of the things that makes Twitter a great tool for business. For one-man companies, it is easy: the company is almost equal to their person and so can be their Twitter account. They can just sneak in a few business related tweets now and than.

For larger operations, there is a catch: Do you follow business accounts? I don’t. If I’m interested in a business I try to find the founder or an important developer related to it. I might follow a business account if I’m a customer, or are really really waiting for them to launch, but other than that? Nope.

Now let’s look at why this is:

News from the company itself is obviously commercial. We don’t like to read commercial messages.

Without a real person attached to it, it is much harder to identify. Most people I follow are selected on some kind of commonality: maybe they are into design, maybe they are developers or in a start-up. I don’t have anything in common with your company, except if you are the competition or when I’m already your customer.

It is hard to tweet regularly. Without day to day stuff to tell about, it is hard to keep something interesting going. It can quickly slide down to the RSS feed level. Without regular tweets you will not be remembered and get the attention you aspired.

So, company accounts on Twitter can’t work? Yes, they can. Let’s look at @Kissmetrics. They are obviously commercial, their twitter account is for a service, nothing personal about that. If you scan their time-line, there is no cooking, cleaning, traveling or complaining. Still, their feed doesn’t feel unpleasant. Although you are aware of their business interest, they provide great content at a fairly high rate. Let’s break their strategy down a bit:

Great content – Their blog posts are high quality, relevant to their niche, without being an advertisement

Great linked content – All relevant links, closely related, but not about their product

Good retweets – Again relevant links, without much effort to create content. It does take a knowledgable person, involved in the business to pick out that quality

Smart Quotes – It allows them to put out a message on how they operate and their vision, without resorting to sales speak.

All of this results in:

Regular tweets, showing up in the timeline frequently

Lots of retweets, that further increasing visibility

What it comes down to: Publish content your customers want, instead of promoting your product. Finding a good balance between your own content and linked content can reduce effort and improve continuity.

Who is writing?

A 33 year old entrepreneur and developer. I am currently obsessed with monitoring at Observu. My main activities, besides coming up with ideas, are: Xamarin.Forms, Python, PHP programming and Design.read more...